A Monster Called Leatherette

She came in through the village entrance and found no trace of the old squalor. The ground was still bare earth, but it had been swept clean and the filth that used to sit in every corner carted away, so the streets were spotless and nothing stank.

“My lady!”

The village chief came running to greet Chloe, who had only just set foot in the village, and bent deep at the waist. With Builder away logging, the chief had charge of the cleanup, she had been told.

“You have worked hard.”

Talking down to a white-haired elder still felt awkward to Dong-hui, so she looked away and made a show of inspecting the village.

“Not at all! It is all owing to my lady’s great kindness. We can only be grateful.”

Two days had changed that haggard look out of all recognition, too. The bristling, edgy stare was gone; the eyes turned up at her now brimmed with expectation, and just the sight of them lifted her mood.

“The rebuilding of the village will begin very soon. I have given orders for the repairs to be done in order, worst damage first, so bear that in mind.”

“I beg your pardon?”

Disappointment flickered through the chief’s eyes. He had been quietly hoping his own house would be the first one mended.

“The most badly ruined houses first.”

When Dong-hui said it again, as if to settle the matter for good, the chief hurriedly bowed his head. What white hair was left, sparse and mostly fallen away, stirred in the wind.

“Yes! I shall keep it firmly in mind!”

“When the village has been splendidly rebuilt, I shall grant you, as its chief, a reward. So do your utmost to see it restored. But mind — if I find anywhere lacking, there will be no reward.”

The right carrot is how you get the work rate up!

“Yes! I shall keep it firmly in mind!”

The chief answered in a loud voice full of resolve.

Once the logging wound down, the house repairs moved fast. Builder turned out to be far more capable than she had expected. Exactly as Dong-hui had ordered, he started on the worst-collapsed houses in the village first, and with laborers mobilized in such numbers, three or four of them were repaired in a day. On top of that, men were being paid a daily wage for repairing their own houses; it would have been strange if the work rate had not climbed.

When Gold Rich came back to the Grace estate, he could not hide his astonishment at how much it had changed since the first time. The road to Grace Castle ran straight through the village of Morta, so the difference those weeks had made struck him all the harder.

“This is really Morta?”

He stared out of the carriage window with his mouth hanging open. Passing this village used to mean shutting the windows tight against the stench that rolled off it; now there was no stench at all, and the place was so neatly ordered it might have been somewhere else entirely. Houses that had looked ready to come down at any moment, roofs fallen in and walls eaten away, stood tidied and half-mended, on their way back to looking like new. Even in the moment his carriage went by, the village was busy with the work.

Until quite recently the place had reeked thickly of death; now children’s laughter filled it and it brimmed with life. That was the sound of living things. If it had come this far in less than a single month, there was no imagining how much further it would go. What was more, the lord of this place, Chloe Grace, was a young talent not yet even twenty years old.

He went so far as to halt the carriage, and for a long while he sat gazing at the altered village, unable to shut his mouth. All the way from Morta to Grace Castle he promised himself that the trade with this place must never be allowed to slip out of his hands.

“I greet you, my lady!”

His manner had changed unmistakably from the first time he set foot in the lord’s castle, and the corner of Dong-hui’s mouth slid upward. In the time since she had seen him last, he seemed to have grown noticeably heavier round the middle. Money really was the thing to have, after all.

“You are back sooner than I expected.”
“Yes, my lady. The goods you gave me were all sold the instant I carried them to the capital. There are dozens of nobles who have put in orders ahead, and even the imperial household is taking a great interest in the jewels I sell.”

The imperial household, of all things.

This was something she had not counted on.

Hold on. Is getting tangled up with the imperial household going to do me any good?

After a short deliberation, Dong-hui concluded that it would not.

“You have not gone and told anyone where the jewels came from, I trust?”

Gold Rich waved his hands hurriedly at the hard note in Dong-hui’s voice. Quick on the uptake as he was, he had read the lord’s sour reaction and grasped at once that she wanted nothing to do with the imperial household.

“I have not breathed a word of it!”

The flesh beneath his chin wobbled and swayed as he shook his head.

“Is that so? Good. The moment it comes out that the jewels came from here, my dealings with you are finished.”

Certain now that his quick judgment had not been wrong, Gold Rich smiled and nodded deeply.

“Need you even ask, my lady!”

From where he stood, an exclusive arrangement with the Grace estate was far and away the better bargain. He bowed until his forehead all but touched the ground, anxious not to give the lord the least offense.

“I have been so eager to know what rare treasures you would show me this time that I hardly slept last night.”

Oho. He knows how to flatter, too.

Gold Rich gave the cringing smile of a toady out of a comic book and bowed himself low. Under the lamps set up to make the jewels shine all the better, his oily face glistened.

Dong-hui nodded, unhurried, and two servants carried the chest that had been set to one side out in front of him.

— Gulp!

As the chest came nearer, his throat worked as though he had caught the smell of something delicious. The naked greed of it actually put Dong-hui in a better mood. Someone like this was easier to deal with than a sly old fox who kept his real thoughts hidden.

Red Bear and two knights of outstanding skill stood at Chloe’s side along with Scrooge, and close to thirty knights in full armor guarded the outside of the study. Part of that was readiness for whatever might happen. The rest was to show Gold Rich how the standing of the Grace estate had changed, and to take him down a peg.

From the look on his face, though, it had all been wasted effort. The knights guarding the study inside and out had visibly delighted him; far from being cowed, he wore the expression of a man expecting to be shown something worth a great deal more than last time. The reaction was not the one she had planned for, and it took a little of the wind out of Dong-hui’s sails, though it also warmed her toward Gold Rich a good deal more.

“M-may I be permitted to open it?”

He must have been nervous; he even stumbled over his words.

“Of course. But do take care. There are a good many rare things in there.”

Dong-hui deliberately lowered her voice to a more confidential whisper.

He’s this excited — the least I can do is fan the flames a little.

“But of course, my lady! I shall look at them so carefully that not one scratch comes to them.”

Waiting at the ready beside the chest, Gold Rich even drew a pair of white gloves out of his pocket and pulled them on before he carefully opened it. The higher the lid rose, the brighter his eyes shone, like jewels catching the light.

“Hm? What is all this?”

He asked it in a puzzled voice, the open lid still in his hands.

“I told you, did I not. Precious things. Every one of them has a case of its own besides.”
“Oh, oh, oh! Do you mean to say the cases have been made out of Bordoa cloth as precious as this!”
“Bordoa? Yes. Bordoa cloth.”

Velvet, it seemed, was called Bordoa cloth here.

“And here is a case made of the most exquisite leather! What leather can this be? I have never seen its like — it is extraordinarily thin, and the grain of it is magnificent!”
“Leatherette.”
“Is there such an animal? Ah! A monster, then! Ah… I knew it. I always knew my lady was someone quite out of the ordinary.”

It isn’t, though.
It’s just synthetic leather.

Explaining it properly would plainly get her nowhere, so Dong-hui left Gold Rich to imagine whatever he liked.

Wondering, herself, what a monster called Leatherette ought to look like.

“Oh, oh, oh! I have never seen a leather with a color as lovely as this.”

In a place where a carved wooden box was the finest thing anyone owned, a case of plastic faced with velvet and leatherette was a rarity all by itself.

“Good heavens! And the cloth lining the inside of the case! The sheen of it!”

Gold Rich stroked the yellow cloth, glossy as anything where the sunlight caught it, and marveled.

“Nylon.”
“I beg your pardon? Is there such a cloth?”
“A very precious cloth indeed. One you would be hard put to find anywhere in these parts.”
“Oh, oh, oh! It is wonderfully soft.”

What he liked best of all were the necklaces and bracelets of new design she had brought back from Gold Diamant. Looking at a necklace worked as fine as thread, at diamonds set smaller than a fingernail, he exclaimed over and over that no human hand could ever make such things. And every last piece of it came in a case.

Gold Rich ran a thick gloved hand over the glossy cloth and stole a glance at the lord, sitting there with an arrogant look on her face. He was desperate to know where on earth a lord this young came by jewels as precious as these.

However far back he cast his mind over the Grace lord’s past, there was nobody she had had any dealings with. No, it was safe to say that hardly a merchant alive came into this barren land, dirt-poor as it was, with nothing worth squeezing out of it however hard you looked. And no noble came calling either, unless it was Viscount Patrasche, whose head was full of taking the estate away from a child.

The curiosity had risen right up to his throat, but letting it out of his mouth looked likely to cost him this deal as well, so he kept his lips clamped shut. Where profit was concerned, Gold Rich could swallow any amount of curiosity.

Seething curiosity hidden under a decorous expression, he went over everything closely, from the cases to the jewels themselves, then laid down the vast sum of three thousand gold and vanished.

At the sight of the chest packed full of gold coins, Scrooge broke into a grin so wide it looked ready to reach his ears. The moment Red Bear had withdrawn, though, the grin turned straight into a look of worry.

“My lady, where in the world are all these jewels coming from?”

However hard Scrooge thought about it, there was nowhere jewels on this scale could have come from. Besides, if treasure like this had been sitting in the house, there would have been no need to hand the estate’s land to Viscount Patrasche for a song. More than a few things here failed to add up. Nor was there any chance that a lord who never stirred out of the castle had gone off somewhere and stolen them.

“There is a treasure storehouse my father told only me about. I have simply remembered it now, that is all.”
“A treasure storehouse?”
“Scrooge.”
“Yes, my lady!”

The suspicion in Scrooge’s eyes was more than Dong-hui cared to meet, and she quietly looked away.

“Send for the treasurer.”

It had struck her that the money really did need managing in some systematic way. What Scrooge said back was nothing she had expected.

“Our estate has a treasurer of its own, my lady?”
“We do not?”
“One needs finances to manage before one sends for a treasurer, my lady. What little budget there was, I have been managing myself all this while, have I not.”
“But are you not the butler?”
“Butler, and treasurer, and my lady’s tutor besides.”
“I have no memory of ever taking a lesson from you.”
“That would be because my lady ran away every single time.”
“Ah-ha!”

No wonder the hollows under Scrooge’s eyes look like that.
He’d been a terribly busy man all along, Scrooge had.

“Then from today you, Scrooge, are to do the treasurer’s work and nothing else.”
“Does that mean…”
“Take on more people. The finances are ample now, and there will be more work to go round.”
“R-really, my lady?”

At the thought of having his work cut down, Scrooge forgot even the suspicion that had been creeping up in him, and was so moved that tears stood in his eyes.

Once Scrooge had settled on giving the treasurer’s work his whole attention, he picked a replacement out of the household staff himself. He must have had his eye on somebody all along, because within a single day he was pushing the man who would do the butler’s work in his stead out in front of Dong-hui.

The man was young and handsome, with light brown hair very nearly blond and striking green eyes. Tall, too, and built well enough that anyone would have believed him if he had said he was a knight. Nerves had him stiff from head to foot, like a mannequin on display in a department store.

Dong-hui looked at the tall, fine-featured new butler and smiled with great satisfaction.

Oho!
Most desirable.

“From today I am to take up the post of butler, my lady. I am called Handsome.”

“Handsome? Your name is Handsome?”